I found myself looking through the Wayback Machine at http://web.archive.org and it is fantastic to see so much stuff that has disappeared still visible. If you want to look at how sites used to look then you have got to look back there. You type in the URL you are interested in and the Wayback Machine will show you the dates they stored it on.
I found some of my old stuff in there … fantastic!!! Well … for me anyhow 🙂
I am actually really grateful for this archive storage because it still has my original domain in there, openoutsource.com. On this domain we spent over a year of effort before the domain fell through stupid administration loopholes when trying to transfer the registration of the domain from OneAndOne and WestHost – “Two hosts I never want to see ever again!”. All our efforts just faded away when the transfer failed and someone else snapped it up and just put up a domain ads page. Anyway, that is where it ended.
Looking through the Wayback Machine I have found a few of my old ideas, … OK, not worth anything to anyone but still a really nostalgic exercise for me. I’ll post them up in the blog, in notebook fashion … just for the record.
Anyway, I am sure there are quite a few gems in the Wayback Machine. I looked back at YouTube which first appeared in there on 28th April 2005 but had at least some content showing on 14th June 2005. Doesn’t seem that long ago does it?
If I dig up more in the future I will post them here…
Here is an interesting page of more early pages of famous sites at http://web.archive.org/collections/pioneers.html.